Like I've said in these comments, I'm constantly surprised by which settings people change and which ones they don't, so differing opinions on exa's defaults is nothing new. exa shares my opinion of wanting to see thousand separators and byte suffixes by default; ls, on the other hand, has no opinion because with file sizes that small, it didn't really have to choose what the output should be like.

People have said that in scripts you'd want to just output the file size in bytes, and they're right, otherwise the numbers won't sort correctly. If you're writing a script, though, you're going to be taking more care than if you were just wanted to list some files. I've lost count of the number of times I've listed a directory, given up trying to count the digits of the file sizes, then re-ran the command with `ls -h`, but I've never written a script without thinking about what the output should be like.